The best worst sports TV show

Take some people who have never done television and give them a three-hour live show on Channel 4. Set the cameras rolling at midnight and send the crew out for beer and pizzas. The year is 1998 and you are watching the shambolic but much loved sports phone-in Under The Moon. By John Naughton.

It's the early hours of Thursday morning, sometime in 1998 in a basement studio on Horseferry Road, central London. Under The Moon, the anarchic, haphazard, accident-prone, profanity-strewn, nocturnal live television phone-in programme, is in full swing and one of its guests, David Vine, the veteran BBC sports anchor - a man accustomed to a more controlled environment - is growing increasingly uncomfortable.

Suddenly, the show's garrulous host, Danny Kelly, attempts to sum up televised snooker's decline in comparison with the glory years of the early Eighties.

'I said to him,' Kelly recounts, '"The thing about snooker David, is that it's no good now since they've all stopped taking mountains of cocaine." At this, The Vine said, "I don't have to listen to this shit," ripped off his mic and stormed off the set, never to return.'

Sitting in an old-school caff near his Islington townhouse, Kelly pauses for a sip of Diet Coke. 'So that was an interview which it would be fair to say had gone badly,' he reflects. 'It wasn't the worst, though.'

It is an incident that deserves a place alongside other great televisual flounces, such as John Nott or the Bee Gees, but it never achieved such status because it occurred in the small hours of a Thursday morning on Channel 4 and thus was seen by only a handful of insomniacs.

As Kelly himself acknowledges: 'Whenever people stop me - and it does happen surprisingly frequently - and say, "Oh I loved Under The Moon," I always say, "In that case you were either a taxi driver, a student or a junkie."'

Generally, when writers champion a cult film, band or TV programme, they point to its profound, but unacknowledged, influence on a host of pale imitations that have progressed to undeserved commercial acclaim. This isn't the case with Under The Moon. Certainly, it shared part of its irreverent DNA with the Saturday morning shenanigans of Soccer AM, but that too remains a cult (which started before Under The Moon) and that's pretty much where the trail goes cold.

Under The Moon can, however, claim something less profound, but more immediate. It was fun. For those who watched it and those who worked on it. The small but passionate club of nighthawks who supported it during its brief, but incident-packed, two-season run in the late Nineties really, really liked it. Their reward for missing out on many hours of beauty sleep was a weekly lock-in at a sporting Tiswas, a melange of improvised humour, respect-free interviews (as above), idiotic competitions and breathalyser-busting japes and tomfoolery, laced with the extra unpredictability that it was all live and the eccentric, insomniac British public was never more than a phone call away.

After a pilot that went out just before Christmas 1996, the show proper began the following February. Opinion about why it came into being remains divided. 'It only ever started out as a spoiler for the launch of Channel 5,' explains the comedian Tom Binns, whose original remit on the show ran to product reviews, before he graduated to co-presenter. 'Channel 4 got wind that Channel 5 [due to launch in March 1997] were going to do a sports phone-in every night, so to stop that looking unique and original they created Under The Moon. We were only there to fuck them up.'

As Kelly recalls, however, C4 did already have a late-night phone-in show before Under The Moon called Night Talk presented by Gary Imlach, which Kelly remembers as being 'toe-curlingly difficult to sit through'.

At the time, the never-knowingly-underemployed Kelly, former editor of NME and Q, had a full-time job editing the now-defunct magazine Total Sport ('the template for OSM,' he claims), as well as a successful Saturday afternoon football phone-in on TalkRadio with longtime collaborator Danny Baker - 'two hours sober before the game, two hours pissed afterwards'.

'I said, "Go on. I'll do it for a laugh,"' he remembers. 'So Channel 4 upped the budget and asked me what I wanted to do. I said lots of guests, live for hours on end, plenty of hoopla, do some comedy things and talk to people just as they talk to each other in pubs. Not broadcasting punditry, which you don't need.'

Whatever the true reason for it coming into being, what's not in dispute was that the opening shows were a disaster. The first, on 12 February 1997, coincided with England's World Cup qualifier against Italy at Wembley (aptly, a defeat) and the programme - with characteristic eccentricity - had set up an outside broadcast with a Father Rosso, parish priest of St Peter's Italian Catholic Church in Islington.

'Between agreeing to do the interview and it taking place, Father Rosso had obviously had second thoughts,' Kelly recalls. 'As soon as I started doing the interview, it was clear he didn't want to do it any more. He spoke perfectly good English, but started to adopt this broken English and kept saying [puts on cartoon Italian accent], "I cannot 'ear you very well ... " For 10 minutes we had probably the most unexciting outside broadcast ever, as a man spoke in broken English about how he couldn't hear me properly. To make it worse he kept trying to shuffle away from the camera and the camera had to try and follow him.'

Although it aired only a decade ago, Under The Moon embodied a very different approach to the one that prevails in TV today. Where today's presenters are predominantly well tutored and telegenic, Channel 4 in the Nineties had enjoyed huge success with The Word, which seemed to seek out ever-more incompetent and unskilled presenters, culminating in the fondly remembered Huffty, whose generous physical frame, Geordie lineage and sexual orientation could always guarantee a spiteful spread or three in the Daily Mail. The lack of TV experience enjoyed by Under The Moon's presenters was, at its most charitable, indicative of a time when TV companies were prepared to take greater risks, or, more cynically, an attempt to garner easy publicity by creating calculated chaos in the studio.

Kelly's prior TV experience, for instance, consisted solely of presenting a pre-recorded show called The Greatest, a quest to find Britain's top sportsman. 'Its "creative consultant" was Daley Thompson,' Kelly remembers. 'The greatest British sportsman of all time, the programme decided, was Daley Thompson.'

The demands of live television, not least a three-hour programme going out at midnight, offered a different challenge.

'I always hated the fact,' Kelly recalls, 'that as we got nearer to showtime, I'd be getting more and more perfectionist and everyone behind the camera would be getting more relaxed. They're thinking, "Only 20 minutes to go and then it'll be this fool on his own and we can get the pizzas in." The moment it went live, their pizzas would arrive. So at the top of the show, you're adrenalised to fuck and the sweat would be popping off you and they'd be just lining up the mozzarella special.'

Adding to the programme's difficulties, Kelly and his then co-host Tim Clark, a comedian with experience as MC at the Comedy Store but none on television, were not enjoying a particularly harmonious relationship.

'Man, those early shows didn't go well,' Kelly says with a rueful smile. 'I'm not blaming Tim entirely, but it didn't help that he wouldn't rehearse and he was having trouble with his contact lenses so couldn't read the autocue. Those first 10 shows, I remember them being particularly disastrous.'

Rick Thomas, the show's original producer, confirms that Clark struggled with the autocue - 'that stuff could drive you to distraction' - and that all was not well between the two presenters. 'Danny and Tim were not gelling as well as we would have liked,' he recollects diplomatically. 'Certainly, as the cliche goes, the chemistry wasn't there. I think after two or three shows we were aware that this could be a problem.'

Clark was shown the door and Binns was promoted to co-presenter with responsibility for comic interludes. Even though this improved the show, it wasn't, according to Binns at least, a perfect solution.

'The whole thing was managed chaos even when it was working,' he says, smiling. 'I think the show had a fundamental flaw in that there was always tension between what I was doing and what the show was about. Danny was impatient and he wanted to talk about sport. Then the guests wanted to speak and he would hate that because it meant that he wasn't talking.'

'Two great things happened at this time,' Kelly says with a laugh. 'Tim left and I got promoted to a boxing glove. Previously I'd been sitting in a giant catcher's mitt. I was never comfortable with that. I know nothing about baseball.'

Whatever the studio furniture might have suggested, however, the driving force behind the programme remained football.

'We always had to have a Premiership footballer on the show,' Thomas recalls. 'Then we'd also get a non-football sportsman and one totally non-sporting guest.'

'Thanks to the fantastic researchers we managed to get footballers on every week,' Kelly adds. 'And we got them on from every club. Except Arsenal. Finally, during the '98 World Cup [when the programme went out three nights a week] there's a crack in the dam and Nigel Winterburn comes on. After the show I said to him, "Why won't anyone from Arsenal come on this show?" and he said, "Oh, Ian Wright won't let us. He says he doesn't think it's any good and we shouldn't be going on bad television programmes." Now, given what Ian Wright has done on television since then, I'd say that's rich.'

As well as the financial incentive for guests of approximately £1,000 appearance money (still in those days almost a meaningful sum to Premiership footballers), the show was fast developing a reputation for hosting a lively post-show party in the green room.

'You've got young sportsmen, the beautiful young women who work in television and free drink,' Kelly reasons. 'So the green room was like this fetid swamp of sexual activity immediately after the show. When Sol Campbell was on the show, he hit on every single woman in the room in the course of a tremendous two-hour session of setting up dates and dinners. I remember Neil Ruddock getting off with a female British sports star who shall remain nameless. She sat on top of the fridge where we had all the beer and, every time he wanted a drink, she had to open her legs so that he could open the door. It was one of the most ungainly courtships I've ever seen.'

Not that the drinking was confined to the green room.

'There was always a tremendous amount of alcohol on the set,' Kelly avers. 'It was generally kept underneath the table - a big thing in the shape of a darts board. There were numerous ad breaks and films during which everyone - but not me - would get tanked up. The best for this was Phil Tufnell, who was absolutely mad for the drink. He was on several times and he was always a great interview, but often he would be so desperate for a drink that as we came back from an ad break he'd be on his hands and knees underneath the table drinking.'

With free-flowing adrenaline and readily available alcohol, the segue from on-show drinking to after-hours carousing was seamless. And often involved Neil Ruddock.

'It was about half-four in the morning and drink had been taken,' Kelly recounts of another post-match session. 'England had played Luxembourg that night and the team had flown back to a hotel near Heathrow. Ruddock was telling me how he was best friends with Alan Shearer because they were at Southampton together as kids. In the way that men sometimes do, I said, "Argh, you're not that big with Shearer." The next thing, he's ringing Alan Shearer, he gets through, shouts, "Shearer. You're fucking useless." And hands the phone to me.'

By the start of the 1997-98 football season, the show had established itself as a late-night Wednesday fixture. 'Channel 4 liked it,' Rick Thomas confirms, 'because it delivered a young, studenty, unemployed audience. People who'd come back from the pub and the football.'

Forthcoming events were about to confirm some home truths about the extent of its influence. Following the death of Princess Diana, all fixtures on the following Saturday (the day of her funeral) were postponed. This did not meet with the approval of the show's presenters.

'All I said,' Kelly remembers, 'was that I do not understand why we've cancelled the football. As far as I'm aware she wasn't even a member of the royal family any more and when Winston Churchill died - and he defeated fascism - we just had a minute's silence. I thought it was a perfectly safe and sane thing to say. Wow, was I wrong.'

Tom Binns recalls events slightly differently.

'I had tickets to see Sunderland at Liverpool and that got cancelled so I was furious,' he recalls. 'We worked on some material on the afternoon before the show and I think Danny's actual line was "Airhead Sloane who sucked off our tax tits." Now I can't remember if he said that on air. I think he did. It was definitely his line, but I might have said it, I can't remember.'

'The hate mail and phone calls started almost immediately,' Kelly laughs. 'The next day I went out to get my lunch and a bunch of builders shouted, "That's him, that's the mouthy fucker", forcing me to take cover. That night I went out for a few drinks in Seven Dials [in Covent Garden]. I hailed a taxi and leant in the window. Before I can say anything, the driver says, "Not you, she was our Queen," and drove off leaving me like a schmuck on the pavement.

'I used to drink in two pubs on a Friday, one down in Chiswick and one in Poland Street [Soho],' he continues. 'I suddenly got phone calls from both of them saying these pubs are absolutely full of tabloid journalists looking for you. I realised that I was now being set up as the man who hates Lady Di. I suggest that you might not recover from that kind of publicity. In fact I'm saying that Barrymore's got more chance of recovering. So I left the country. I had a girlfriend at the time who was working on the film Divorcing Jack in Belfast and so I thought I'm going to hide in plain sight. Where would they not look for an anti-royalist? So I hid in loyalist Belfast.'

Recovering from this setback and with Kelly back in the country, the show underwent another change in personnel with the arrival of Lisa Rogers. Having worked in TV production, but with no experience as a presenter, Rogers applied for the job partly as a way to ensure that she would be able to watch the forthcoming World Cup.

'She was a great laugh and a very good broadcaster,' Kelly asserts. 'I also remember the letter of application from Lisa and in it she said, "I can do everything currently done by Jonathan [the incumbent handler of faxes and emails] and in addition I have got magnificent tits." Within hours she had replaced Jonathan. She was a tremendous addition, not least because whenever we needed some relief from my big spacehopper of a head, we could cut to Lisa.'

Rick Thomas confirms this story while adding: 'She clearly knew her sports, was good fun and well prepared. She was happy to take the piss out of herself, do stupid things and get into the spirit of it.'

Rogers has a different version of events.

'No, I don't remember that,' she laughs, 'but I do remember sending a picture of me holding a banner which said, "Ooh Aah Ray Parlour." And my shirt was quite tight. I don't think subtlety has ever been my strong point, but I don't remember doing that!'

She swiftly earned promotion from 'Jonathan's cupboard' to the main stage. Soon she was involved in controversy. When Jordan appeared on the show, she brought with her a puppy that Rogers caused to yelp with a hamfisted attempt to pick it up by one of its folds of skin.

'We got inundated with letters and emails about animal cruelty,' she recalls. 'And this was on a show where the previous week Tom Binns had called an 11-year-old boy a cunt after he'd kicked him up the arse. No one batted an eyelid at that, which sort of sums up the Great British Public, doesn't it?'

'The thing about that though,' points out Binns at a later moment, 'is that the kid actually was a cunt.'

The arrival of Rogers and a game she hosted called 'Flaps In Space' heightened the laddish humour that had always been integral to the show's mixture.

'We introduced Sports Masseur of the Year,' recalls Binns, treading Spinal Tap's fine line between sexy and sexist. 'Each week a different, gorgeous sports masseuse would rub me down. Frequently, Danny would cut to me and I would be completely naked getting a lovely rubdown. The last week we did it, a great hairy beast of a man tied my limbs in knots as payback.'

Given the post-pub hours of broadcast and the knockabout humour, it's hardly surprising that the show received more than its fair share of abusive phone calls.

'Soon the challenge became to get under the wire,' Kelly recalls. 'Pretend that you wanted to talk about Lester Piggott's new riding style and then shout something abusive to either Lisa or myself. With Lisa, it was usually a proposal of marriage put in very straightforward terms and in my case it was some comment about how fat I am. I put up with this fairly graciously most of the time until two occasions when I cracked under the pressure.

'In one case, a guy came on and said, "Oh, you're a bit fat for television aren't you?" I walked up to the camera and live on air, I said, "Why don't you leave me alone, you fucker?" Some weeks later someone else did it and I just sat there and said, "Right, you know where we are, we're in Horseferry Road in Victoria. We finish at three o'clock. At four o'clock, after I've had a chance to have a drink, let's do it." I actually went outside at four and waited but no one came. Still, I think the on-air challenge to step outside may well have been a televisual first.'

Kelly wasn't alone in running into difficulty on the show. Tom Binns incurred a £20,000 libel payout to Robbie Fowler for his playful response to one caller and found himself regularly falling foul of C4's legal department.

'If you make a programme for Channel...#8239;4 nowadays,' he explains, 'they send out a lawyer to brief you in compliance and he has a video which contains all the things you can't do. Most of this is illustrated by me on Under The Moon.'

By the time of the 1998 World Cup finals, Binns was, by his own admission, being 'rested', but this didn't prevent him from making one further - and, as it turned out, final - contribution.

'I phoned in quite stupidly,' he reflects. 'It was the night of the England-Argentina game in St...#8209;Etienne where Owen had scored that wonder goal and I said, "I'm not gay, but I would definitely give Michael Owen one up the arse." That was pretty much it for me. I didn't come back after that phone call.'

Just as there is dispute about why Under The Moon came into being, so there are different versions of why it came to an end. Rick Thomas attributes it to new commissioning editors looking to make their mark. Kelly, however, claims he was asked to host the show for another 18 months, but the pressure of other commitments - by then he was a director of the internet company behind Football365 - prevented him from doing so. 'I thought they'd just get another presenter,' he reasons, 'but they closed it down.'

Tom Binns, having already departed the show, found himself at the radio station Xfm, where he was on the wrong end of another sizeable fine for 'doing jokes about bestiality at 8.20 in the morning'. The experience proved a chastening one - 'It's amazing how a £50,000 fine can sharpen your sensibilities.' Last August he was nominated for an If.comedy award (aka the Perrier) at Edinburgh for his performance as a hopeless hospital DJ, Ivan Brackenbury, with which he is now touring the country and about to launch a series on Radio 2. Lisa Rogers has hosted a variety of TV shows, most notably Scrapheap Challenge, in between raising a family. Meanwhile, Danny Kelly continues to work on radio aside from his full-time job as a director of the how-to internet company, VideoJug. Rick Thomas remains at the show's producers, ICM, but still remembers Under The Moon as 'one of the most enjoyable times professionally for me'.

'It was incredibly irreverent, incredibly casual and it remains the most underproduced show I've ever worked on,' Rogers recalls. 'But in a good way. It really flew. It was like going to the pub with your mates, it wasn't like going to work.'

'After I'd left the show,' Binns reminisces, 'I did a warm-up slot for Dom Joly and the Cure were on his show. Afterwards I was in the green room with this girl and I said, "Should we go up and talk to Robert Smith?" Finally we decided to go for it and I said, "Hello I'm Tom Binns," and he said, "Yeah, I know who you are, you're my hero. Every Wednesday night me and the band used to stay up late, smoke a spliff and watch Under The Moon. You're a comedy genius." I'm not making this up, although it's a difficult story to tell without coming across as an arrogant cock.'

Kelly had his share of personal problems during the course of the programme, seeing his marriage finish and undergoing an operation to remove a cancer in his eye. He has no doubt, however, that the good memories outweigh the bad. His enduring memory of a show noted for carrying features on suppositories that could make you run faster, skateboarding dogs, Norwegian weather girls singing their national anthem and a caller whose wife could only achieve orgasm while wearing an Eric Cantona shirt remains the nearly always - David Vine excepted - good-natured guests.

'I would say, "Hats off to the guests,'" he laughs. 'Admittedly we had drugged them up to the eyeballs - but they were so generous and they would laugh at anything and they would join in with everything. Maybe it was the lateness of it, maybe the incredible informality of it, but they could be asked anything and they would do just about anything.'

Magic moon highlights

Ostrich racing

'What makes me laugh about the way we covered sports like ostrich racing is that the producers took it so seriously. It was so testosterone-fuelled. They couldn't see any difference between ferret racing and F1 and stripped all jokes out accordingly.'

Cheerleaders

'We had cheerleaders in every week - such as from the London Monarchs - and we ran a competition to design outfits. The sole purpose of this was so I could say, as I leant on a sewing machine, "Send us your designs for the cheerleaders and I'll knock them up."'

Bowling With Uncle Billy and Auntie Peggy

'This is my real uncle and auntie and we filmed it in a leisure centre in Sunderland. Peggy was a champion bowler and she demonstrated the moves every week while Billy talked us through what she was doing.'

King's Cross Steelers

'We did a film about the world's first gay rugby team and followed their progress for a long time because they had never won a match. Then, joyously, their captain called in one night to tell us of their first success.'